| | Published February 26th, 2014
| Orinda Startup Blazes Its Way into the Retail App World
| | By Sophie Braccini |  | | From left: Peter Jackson, Darby Anderson, Sandy Breber, Erin MacEwen, Jake McGuire and Paul Martinelli. Photo Sophie Braccini |
Sandy Breber loves to shop, but she is also efficient and on top of things, so she wants her receipts, reward and gift cards, her coupons, to be organized and at her fingertips when she needs them; and preferably accessible on her phone, the one device she never leaves home without. No wonder Breber is one of the three founders of Ziploop, Inc., the Orinda-based company which launched a new app four months ago that digitizes and manages receipts, coupons, and promotions.
The local startup must be responding to a real need because it has already attracted more than 10,000 users and gets a new user every couple of minutes, according to Ziploop's CEO Peter Jackson. Ziploop does everything Breber wanted, and more - and it's free to download and use.
Ziploop is part of the new world of cloud-hosted, digitized shopping documents. Other apps include Gyft, Lemon Wallet and OneReceipt. The idea arose during a conversation between Breber, a former managing partner at Anderson Consulting, and fellow Orindan Peter Jackson, an entrepreneur with previous success in business endeavors such as Granit System; his first company, based in Lafayette, had 7,800 employees when he sold it, and Orinda-based Intraware was a software delivery and maintenance service that grew to $3 billion on the Nasdaq.
The third member of the trio is Paul Martinelli, code writer extraordinaire, who has partnered with Jackson before.
The three wanted to develop a service based on super-cheap Cloud storage and smartphones. "And that's when Sandy entered," says Jackson. "She said that retail is a mess, that people keep getting papers (receipts, coupons) that end up in their purses (or wallets). They need them for returns, proof of purchase, warranties. Plus you get a variety of things in the mail; and it is going to take five or six years for all that to become digital." Jackson recalls that at this point in the conversation Martinelli proposed the idea of taking an image of everything you have in your purse and using an app to sort it and organize it.
Ziploop also features tags that users can create to track purchases by category. Breber keeps track of what she spends for each of her kids. She also loves the 'safe' space where people can store items that are important to them in the long term. "You can use it to store bills for big ticket items, or to keep different purchases together as part of a larger project," she says.
And Ziploop is not only for women, even though Breber wanted to give it a non-aggressive look with soft colors - but no pink. In fact, Home Depot records are among the most frequently stored.
Dan McInerny is an early user of the application. "I like to keep my receipts organized and have them available if I need to return something," says McInerny who shops at sporting goods establishments, surf shops, Target, or the Apple Store, "I keep my reward cards there as well because it is easy and simple." McInerny noticed that some retailers can send receipts to email addresses, and so he gives them his Ziploop email, and keeps everything organized by category in one place.
Since the app is free, the company needed a revenue stream. According to a Deloitte Consulting LLP study, "The Dawn of the Mobile Influence," "... customer behaviors are changing profoundly ... Consumer adoption of mobile is growing at an exponential rate;" the same report also notes that, "(among) consumers who are 25-34 years old: 65 percent own a smartphone and 68 percent use it to help with shopping in a brick-and-mortar retailer." Having reward cards, time sensitive promotions, and targeted rebates sent directly to customers' cell phones made sense; this is where Ziploop makes its money.
"It costs companies 0.40 cents to a dollar to send loyalty cards or coupons in the mail, and they don't know what the response rate is," says Jackson, "but if you opt in and like five stores, then they will populate your rewards (directly in the Ziploop account) and we would charge them only 0.10 cents. And you will only get what you want."
Lamorinda Weekly business articles are intended to inform the community about local business activities, not to endorse a particular company, product or service.
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Lamorinda Weekly, Moraga CA